It's tough being a royal
As an aside, I've no idea how to properly express this relationship, but I saw a reference a couple of weeks ago to someone's 8th great grandmother, which seemed to use the generational numbering associated with cousins. If I'm correct about that then Orpha would be my third great grandmother, or something like that. This stuff can be so confusing.
But I started roaming through Orpha's portion of the tree and found all sorts of connections to British peerage and eventually to Elizabeth Woodville, whose second husband, Edward IV, king of England, was of the York family, and their symbol was the white rose.
That would have meant that I was related to royalty, a situation that may not be as uncommon as it sounds. See Everyone on earth is your cousin by Tim Urban, where the writer makes the case that mathematically pretty much all of us are related to someone in the past who was famous.
I say "would have" because that connection eventually disappeared in the tree. Someone had changed the entry showing Orpha's lineage coming through one of Elizabeth's daughter, who married King Henry VII, which would have made a connection to that scoundrel Henry VIII. Still, I began to be curious about the people and thought the history I began to unearth was interesting.
While quickly checking Wikipedia entries, I discovered that Elizabeth Woodville was often referred to as "The White Queen" because Edward was a Plantagenet and a descendant of the Duke of York, whose family symbol was a white rose. This appellation struck an immediate nerve because I had seen a movie by that title, which turned out to be based on a novel about Elizabeth Woodville. I received a copy of the book as a Christmas gift a couple of years ago.
Elizabeth (who predates Elizabeth I, the famous predecessor of Elizabeth II) was the daughter of a sort of middle level peer, Richard Woodville, 1st Earl Rivers, who somehow took it in her head that she would someday be a queen and that the quickest route to doing this would be to marry King Edward IV. Details are sketchy but the story is (not just the one in the novel, but in the annals of history) that Edward dropped by the Woodville estate, became enamored of the beautiful Elizabeth. amd became a frequent visitor, taking Elizabeth as a mistress.
She convinced him to marry her in a private ceremony that later became public after Edward's advisors tried to arrange an alliance marriage with foreign royalty. She pressed him to reveal their marriage and have her elevated to the position of queen or queen consort, depending on who you read.
Elizabeth's previous marriage produced two sons, and she had more children with Edward, including a son who would be his direct heir, which would have fulfilled another of her dreams. She set about seeing to the granting of titles and privileges for her family members, and this combined with a marriage that had thwarted Edward's advisors because they had other plans that would have benefitted them, which made Elizabeth a number of powerful enemies.
The whole, long tale of Edward's life and reign, which encompasses the War of the Roses, is fraught with struggles for power that eventually ended the Plantagenet reign and saw the rise of the Tudors. She died a number of years later, possibly of the plague.
A letter discovered in England's National Archives, written almost 20 years after her death seems to ascribe its cause to the plague, which would explain why her burial was a quick and relatively small affair. Unfortunately, Elizabeth is not referred to in the letter by name, and researchers came to the conclusion she might be the subject through contextual clues.
So if I'm not directly related to Elizabeth Woodville, given the change to the family tree, why in the world am I writing about this part of English history? That would be a result of tracing the lineage of the Littles, whom I featured in the last post. It appears that the Littles are possibly descended on a grandmother's side from a certain Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers, whose sister was ... yep. We'll look at his story a bit next time.
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